CCARF Practice Question

Paper 3 · Question 28

D5 Context Management & Reliability · Paper 3

[Scenario 3: Multi-Agent Research System] A coordinator agent built on the Claude Agent SDK delegates to specialized subagents — web search, document analysis, synthesis, and report generation — to research topics and produce comprehensive, cited reports. Final reports state findings but cite nothing. Investigation shows each summarization step compresses source attribution away, so by synthesis time nobody knows which claim came from where. What is the structural fix?

• A.Have the report generator add plausible citations at the end
• B.Instruct the synthesis agent to write “sources available on request”
• C.Require subagents to output structured claim-source mappings (claim, evidence excerpt, source URL or document name) that every downstream agent preserves and merges through synthesis
• D.Reduce the number of summarization steps to one

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: C

A: invents citations — worse than none in a research product

B: advertises attribution the system no longer possesses

C: Provenance survives only if it is structural: claim-source mappings travel as data through every hop, so synthesis merges attributed claims instead of anonymous assertions. Attribution is preserved, never reconstructed.

D: reduces compression events but the remaining one still strips attribution

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